I would have to agree that Rosetta Stone is much easier to follow along with than a text book. But I think the unordered process it goes in will make any learning much slower in comparison to the learning rate of a book. What I really think Rosetta Stone is useful for is audio practice for those who self study. Outside of a classroom, you'll have very limited chances to speak in Japanese unless you live close to their time zone. Rosetta Stone will give you listening practice. However, it's massively expensive and I don't think it's worth the hundreds of dollars it's sold for.

I used Rosetta Stone as a complement to my Latin studies. I learned most of my vocabulary and all of my grammar usage in the classroom. However, Rosetta Stone got me to a point where I could read a Latin sentence and not think in English, but in Latin. For example, if I hear or see "vir viridis gerens est" then I don't even have to think about all the grammar because I understand the phrase. (The man is wearing green) In fact, most of the time, I'll get the meaning and have to think of the correct way to express that in English. This is very different from when I learned Spanish where I would be thinking in English the whole time.

To summarize, Rosetta Stone got m thinking in Latin. However, it's no substitute to an actual classroom. Also, It's very expensive, but if your school has access to it then you should definitely give it a try.

I've tried it out and the first part was pretty good, about 4-6 words.
A simple picture matching a simple word.
Picture of a cat, meaning neko.
However the next portion jumped to phrases, such as girl riding a horse.
However I couldn't make out from the picture what they were getting at.
Horseback riding, or girl riding a horse, or just horse.
Once I found out, i couldn't pick out which word meant what.

I'm assuming I was probably just thinking too much into it, making it more complicated than it really was. But I'm the type of person that wants to know the details behind it, and how it was all done.

However for some friends of mine, it seemed to work rather well, except them not knowing the details behind the grammar.

I do like the speech portion of it though, but overall I definitly wouldn't think it's worth the money, considering there is so much more stuff out there that would cost 1/4 the money.

Last edited by SourceC0d3 on Fri 12.14.2007 11:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

I have the Rosetta Stone software on my computer and I found it useless unless you want to expand your vocabulary. The "lessons" arent structured at all. You start off looking at pictures of people and animals and you have to pick out the japanese word for such (Without a lesson on what is what that is). Then it progresses on to showing you pictures of people on top of things, inside of things, and under things. It asks you to distinguish what it what. After a while it becomes like on of those memory games you buy from the store. You flip the card over to see if it matches, if it doesnt you flip it back over until you find the match.

I didnt learn anything from it. But the voice recognizer was cool, you get to pratice the words and improve your "japanese sound".